A factory was turned into a chapel today for the funeral of the Segway scooter owner Jimi Heselden, whose hundreds of workers lined the goods delivery bay and staff car park as his cortege arrived draped in flowers.

In a throwback to the days when businesses closed and streets were lined for the passing of great politicians, clergy and - occasionally - industrialists, the former miner was mourned amid the tools and raw materials that made his millions.

More than 2,000 people occupied every seat in a vast marquee on a Leeds industrial estate, among them hundreds of locals who have shared in the 62-year-old's wealth. When he toppled one of his scooters into the river Wharfe in a fatal accident near his estate on the edge of Leeds last month, Heselden had just increased his gifts to charities in the city to a record £23m.

"He protected the armies and peace-keeping forces of the world with his greatest invention, the Bastion Concertainer," said Chris Robinson, senior manager of the Hesco company whose modernised version of Roman defensive gabions - baskets filled with stones and crammed together to create makeshift walls - are used everywhere from Afghanistan to the flood levees of New Orleans. "But he was equally determined to use the money he made to protect the people he grew up with, the ones who hadn't had such good fortune."

The eulogy was applauded by Leeds' lord mayor and other notables, but they were far outnumbered by Heselden's former neighbours and Hesco staff. Flags on all the neighbouring factories flew at half-mast.

The landlady of the local Woodman pub, Kath Dewhurst, recalled the multimillionaire dropping in to do the quiz with his wife, Julie. Chris Kendall remembered Jimi the 15-year-old school leaver lurching round Halton Moor council estate in the area's first car - "even if it didn't start without needing three lads pushing on either side of the running boards".

Heselden's philanthropy was praised not just because of his charity gifts, but through his policy of seeking out jobless young locals, or older people thrown out of work and with little chance of a second career, to join Hesco. Rev Tony Thompson, who conducted the service from a makeshift pulpit and plinth, said: "He paid excellent wages, which restored his workers' sense of self-worth. He changed lives for ever. His values, thoughts and work were all about other people, not himself."

There was also a tribute from the United States army, whose £53m contracts for Bastions in Iraq at the end of the 1990s launched Hesco into the major industrial league. Sergeant David McGregor, who flew from Texas for the funeral, said: "If it wasn't for Jimi's barriers, I would never have gotten out of Iraq. My wife and children would only have a flag to remember me by."

Heselden's only reservation about the ceremony, said David Robinson, would have been the time it took 30 or more staff to wrestle with erecting the marquee. The Bastion's success lies in its rapid erection by two men and a bulldozer, from a flatpack wire box which concertinas open to be filled with rubble, waterbags and sand.

"If he'd been here while we were getting ready, he'd have redesigned the marquee on the spot, taken out 54 patents, fitted it all into a box and pulled a string to put it up," Robinson said.

Leeds is planning a permanent memorial to Heselden, who led a takeover of Segway earlier this year. He planned to supply the scooters for military use, and to help disabled veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.